blech:

IanVisits notes that the Metropolitan line is not the only part of Underground history to have an anniversary this month:

… at some point in January 1933 London Transport printed 700,000 copies of its latest map leaflet, and sparked a revolution.

This was the first mass print-run of Harry Beck’s iconic tube map design — although it is not technically a map, and neither was it the first time such a design had been seen.

The post goes on to point out some of Beck’s inspirations, but the map remains a fantastic (and resonant) piece of design.

artmaps:

United Kingdom and Ireland Laser Etched Map on Etsy

sonicbloom11:

Obviously this blue part here is the land

thingsmagazine:

Great Britain. Her natural and industrial resources

(via Boston Public Library)

artmaps:

Greater London Type map Ursula Hitz

artmaps:

London Street Map on notonthehighstreet.com

toffeemilkshake:

This, Apple, is how you do beautiful map tiles.

Stamen are just miles ahead of anyone else when it comes to this stuff.

blech:

Metrography, by Benedikt Groß & Bertrand Clerc:

the geographical structure of transportation networks are often reshaped to provide users with more understandable transit maps. These distortions have a major influence on people’s perception of a city’s geography, to the point they get stored mentally and become the collective representation of the real world’s geography.

‘Metrography’ attempts to explore this phenomenon using the most famous of transit maps: the London Tube Map.

There’s a 150cm x 100cm lambda print, as well as a slippy-map interactive version, and videos of the deformation.

See also Matt Webb, in 2009:

Consider a true map of London. Now consider crumpling this map so that it’s all scrunched up, but a top down view is the same as the tube map, but on a different scale. Leaving aside whether this transform is possible, this yields what we’re after. As long as the crumpled true map only bends on a station (ie no peaks or trough on a line between nearest stations), then we could say 0% colour intensity was at the lowest point of the crumpled map and 100% was at the top, and show this on the tube map. Task achieved.

Amsterdam in type